Cronus' Children
by Assimbya
Summary: Zeus' winning of the universe, through Hades' eyes.


Zeus was strong. Hades could see that, and he could see that his youngest brother's strength came not only from the Aegis at his chest or the thunderbolts which lay quiet at his side, but also from a brightness in his light eyes, a sun-blessed confidence at which Hades could only wonder. It was a thing entirely foreign to him, and he could imagine only that it was borne of Zeus' bright, alien childhood on Crete's green hills. The rest of them were bereft of it, their eyes grown accustomed to the dark of their father's intestines.

The world, Hades had noted recently, was very bright.

"Of course, we must kill Cronus," Zeus said, because no one else had spoken.

They sat, the six of them, inside an old cave in an abandoned portion of the world. They hid there, fugitives from the wrath of their Titan father, all but Zeus sunken deep into thought and silence.

At her brother's words, Hestia looked up from their campfire, her pale brown hair like a veil before her eyes. She did not speak, but Hades could feel her dark eloquent eyes watching the rest of them. The weight of her silence was palpable.

But slender Hera's soft cows'-eyes met Zeus' own, and she said, her voice breathless, "Yes."

"He is the ruler of the Titans," long-legged Poseidon said, his voice sharp with an edge of condescension, as though Zeus might, in his youthful enthusiasm, have forgotten this pertinent fact.

But Zeus only smiled, the smile of a conqueror. "And I'm his son. Sons replace their fathers. That's what _happens._"

"No," Hestia said with her rough, quiet voice. "our father did it. That doesn't mean it's what always must happen."

"There's a precedent," Hera interjected. "It can be done."

Demeter shifted position, tension clear in the tilt of her shoulder blades. "We could banish him. He can be taken out of power without being killed."

"No," Hades told Demeter then, for her sentimentality could wrought the destruction of them all, "if we do depose him, than we must also kill him. It would be too dangerous to leave him alive."

Zeus was looking at the rest of them, confusion beginning upon his face. "Why are all of you so reluctant to attack him? Surely you can't feel any sort of loyalty?"

"He's our _father," _Demeter said softly.

Zeus' voice was brash, angry. "I believe he relinquished all claims to filial deference when he decided to _swallow _us."

Demeter stood, hands fisted in the heavy fabric of her wool tunic. "Children owe something to their parents. It's just the way things are, I don't know why."

Hera crossed her arms over her knees and tilted her head, looking at her older sister. "There is nothing inherent and unchangeable in the way things are. Who has decided those things? Why can we not be the arbiters of morality in this world?"

Zeus was looking at Hera with lust clear in his eyes. Hades met Poseidon's gaze and saw that he too had noticed it. There was danger in that coupling, perhaps, passionate Hera and confident Zeus. And Zeus' wise and clever consort, the Titan Metis, how would she take to her lover choosing his youngest sister as his queen? From what Hades had heard of Metis' strength and will, he doubted that she would take kindly to such a demotion of status.

But there would be time enough for such worries later. Their own continued survival was challenge enough.

"We must not forget Gaia," Poseidon said, "history tells us clearly what vengeance she can have upon those who harm her children."

Zeus shifted position, laughing carelessly. "Then she must be destined always to be angry. Everything living in this world is descended from her."

Hades found himself irritated by Zeus' nonchalance. "Yes," he said, "she is always destined to be angry. It is her curse."

"Poseidon is right," Hestia said suddenly, "all of us must avoid angering Gaia."

"We have to kill Cronus," Zeus protested, "there may risks in that, but it is necessary. Hades agrees with me. Don't you?"

Hades knew that his approval was being asked only because Poseidon was more likely to listen to him than anyone else, and so he did not find himself flattered. Instead he said, noncommittal, compromising, "We'll take him out of power. Then we shall see."

-

The later stories spoke of the three brothers playing with dice for ownership of the universe, of chance gifting each god with his domain. But, of course, nothing of the sort ever happened. The sea had been Poseidon's since he had first laid eyes upon it, at which moment he found it impossible not to plunge himself within its cool depths, seawater tingeing his hair blue and giving to his skin the textures of seaweed. The heavens could only have belonged to Zeus, whose ambitions were as limitless as the extent of the stars, and entirely as unrooted.

Hades' destiny was never so dramatic. But, in the moment following his turbulent second birth from his father's bile, he laid his palm against the quiet earth and listened to the voices of the dead.

-

The three brothers together went to their father's bedchamber to take him prisoner. Entrance had been won for them through Metis' tricks and connections, but Hades entered first, the helmet gifted to him by the Cyclopes weighing heavy and protective on his scalp. The cold metal against his face was a comfort in its unmoving rigidity, as though the invisibility it conferred would also still his features into emotionless neutrality.

He entered the bedroom, willing his footsteps soft against the stone which was, he knew already, his ally. His parents lay together on the bed, their breath soft in sleep. His mother, Hades noticed suddenly, looked like Demeter, with her wheat-gold hair and soft, rounded form. Cronus, though, looked like no one else Hades knew, but only himself, immortally youthful still, his limbs sinewy and strong, lying carelessly sprawled, his vulnerable neck and chest exposed to the attacks of assassins.

Behind Hades, Zeus and Poseidon followed. Poseidon's long fingers wound themselves around the bronze of his trident, while Zeus' thunderbolts crackled in his palms. Their steps were louder than Hades' had been. Hades could see Rhea shifting, moving out of sleep.

They acted swiftly then. They pulled Cronus up from his sleep, Hades holding his arms behind his back while Zeus held a thunderbolt close to his throat in threat. Rhea started awake at the quick movement, but said nothing, curling up in bed, her eyes wide in nightmare. Cronus screamed at the blue eyes of his youngest son, so similar to his own, calm in determined aggression. Hades watched the vast channel of his father's throat open in fear and knew that the image would populate his insomnia.

-

They did not kill him, in the end. At the sight of Cronus, bound and vulnerable, the other Titans, many of whom had already grown tired of their brother's disorganized and paranoid administration, easily capitulated. Zeus was young and bright and glorious and cheers for him flew easily from his subjects' lips. From Poseidon's side Hades listened as Zeus proclaimed his intention to build a palace for himself at the top of Mount Olympus, ringed by clouds and gilded by sunlight. And then, on the marble steps of his father's palace, Zeus kissed his sister Hera, whose large eyes, traced in dark kohl, widened at the taste of her younger brother's mouth.

No one mentioned Metis. Hades looked for her later, among her Titan brethren, but she had not been seen since Cronus' fall.

Later, privately, Zeus asked Hades if he might hold Cronus prisoner in the deep pits of Tartarus. There, in the fires and torments, he would never escape.

Of course, Hades agreed.

-

He loved his kingdom. His siblings could not understand that love of his, for they were creatures of light and breath and movement. But, deep inside the earth, Hades took the Underworld within himself. On Styx's banks he drank the river water (which tasted of stone and bone and mortal blood) till he could feel in his immortal flesh the knowledge of all those who had crossed over it, even long before his birth. The awareness was overwhelming, but he kept it folded close, safe within the cavity of his chest. They were within him, his subjects, his victims.

Before he arrived, the borders of the Underworld had grown cloudy, Elysium fading into Erebus, Tartarus dripping into the river. He tidied them with his strong, cold hands, planting cypress and myrtle and pomegranate trees in long rows. Soon, weeping willows leaned over the river Lethe, their dripping branches forgetting their form and color where they touched the water. Elysium lay enfolded in a soft golden haze, bounded off from Erebus' lethargy.

He felt pride then, for the first time, that he had made his realm as it ought to be.

He visited each part of it, even Tartarus, where he looked upon the tortures without revulsion or desire. The punishments administered there were not cruelty, or vengeance, for he had little anger in him, no need for revenge, nor did he find pleasure in the administration of pain. The punishments of Tartarus were simply a balancing of the scales, a way of rectifying those offenses against the gods which had been committed in life. They were necessary to maintain order, and they did not trouble him.

But still he turned away at the sound of his father's screams.

-

He rarely left the Underworld, for it needed constant administration, and his absence could be quickly disastrous. And so, though he heard of Zeus' marriage to Hera, he did not attend. He could imagine the ceremonies well enough. Through the veins of the earth, he felt the cosmic reverberations of that union, the Pantheonic implications settling into the shape of the world. But he paid little mind, and instead set his attention to the care of the mind-sick spirit who was refusing to drink the waters of Lethe.

-

One day, Poseidon came to visit him. He was strong, virile, vitally alive, his beard grown long and his arms strong. Sitting underneath Hades' myrtle trees, he looked with some respect upon the veins of metal ore and crystal in the rock above his head. Hades knew better than to offer him something to eat or drink.

In energetic terms, Poseidon talked of his attempted conquest of Demeter. He talked of tricks he'd used, transformations, seductions which promised to wrap her in the ocean's billows, flood her fertile earth with pleasure and fulfillment. She had not succumbed yet, but Poseidon felt certain that she soon it would.

"It would be much easier to manage, however," he told Hades as he reached the end of his rambling explanation, "if Zeus didn't insist on chasing her himself. You would think that he'd be satisfied with one Olympian goddess as a wife, but the arrogant bastard has to have everything for himself. It would be much more appropriate for him to leave Demeter to me. We're suited for one another."

A new thought seemed to occur to Poseidon as Hades listened. "That reminds me – when are you going to find yourself a wife? Hestia is still up in Olympus tending her brother's hearth. You two quiet ones would make a perfect match."

For a moment, Hades considered it, imagined being attracted to Hestia's soft curves, her wise eyes. But the feeling was soon gone, and he was left only with a sense of oddity, imagining marriage to his oldest sibling, the creature he had known as long as he had known himself.

"No," he told Poseidon, "I don't think marriage is for me."

Poseidon shrugged. "Suit yourself."

-

When Demeter came to visit him, her belly was round and her face haggard. She shivered as she stepped off of Charon's boat. "I hate it here," she told Hades before she had said hello, "it makes me feel as though I'm being buried alive. I wish you didn't have to live in this place." One hand was laid protectively over the curve of her stomach, as though to protect the child within from the touch of the dead.

"It's my home," Hades told her noncommittally. He was not offended. Demeter made things grow – how could she like a place where her power held no sway?

Demeter nodded, "I know that," she said, her eyes softening.

"Who is the father?" Hades asked as he led her away from the river, to his palace of dark stone.

Demeter only looked away.

He asked her again, more gently, "Is it Zeus or Poseidon?"

Slowly, she met his gaze. "I don't know," she said quietly.

"I'm sorry," he told her.

She smiled, a bitter little smile he had never seen from her before. "It doesn't matter," she said, "she's mine."

-

When Demeter had left, Hades sat in the pale, unliving grass of the Underworld and sliced open a pomegranate from one of his trees. He ate the seeds one by one, listening to the silence of the dead and glad in the knowledge that he was bound to his realm forever.


End file.
